China's great leap forward

China is racing toward the future, so be quick if you want to witness the
country's unique traditions, says Nigel Richardson, because they're being
bulldozed as hastily as old buildings.

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In recent decades Shanghai has been transformed into a frantic megalopolis of nearly 20 million peoplePhoto: Corbis

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Workers in the rice paddiesPhoto: Alamy

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An elevated Highway in ShanghaiPhoto: Corbis

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A high-speed train at Beijing train stationPhoto: Alamy

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Traditional dancing at the Tang Dynasty Theatre Dinner Show in XianPhoto: Corbis

By Nigel Richardson

11:15AM BST 10 Sep 2010

There were signs up – pictograms of a camera with a red cross through it. No photographs. But the use of eyes was permitted. From a distance, and provided we didn't record it digitally, we were being allowed to witness the future.

"Ahhh!" said the small group of people around me. We blinked and craned our necks, scarcely believing what we were seeing. "Waaa!" Humans were flying.

One hundred yards away across a parade ground of red earth, they were plunging and swooping from the top of a scaffolding wall the height of a 20-storey building. Controlled from the ground by steel cables attached to the middle of their backs, they performed breathtaking aerial routines that will be seen in public for the first time in November, at the opening ceremony of the Asian Games in the Chinese city of Guangzhou.

The incredible flying men, who also performed at the Beijing Olympics, were all students of martial arts at the place where kung fu originated, Shaolin Temple in the heart of China. My partner and I were 10 days into a month-long trip around China, and for the umpteenth time I had been reduced to involuntary vocalising by something unexpected and astonishing.

For China is flying too – in bullet trains, through futuristic airport terminals, on expressways that punch their way nonchalantly through entire mountain ranges – and there seems nowhere progress cannot reach.

Most people are familiar with the neon overdose that is Shanghai, whether they have been there or merely seen the pictures of Nanjing Road and the Pudong skyline. Now the scale and speed of that development is being duplicated across the country.

In the centre of every city, old buildings are being bulldozed to make way for new, and on the outskirts, entire neighbourhoods are sprouting where less than a decade ago peasants worked the fields by hand. Black limousines with darkened windows – once the favoured runabouts of Party cadres, now more likely to belong to nouveau riche entrepreneurs – cruise immaculately landscaped boulevards.

In small towns you may, as we did, come across brassy new hotels with monumental marble atriums, indoor fountains and plasma television screens in the lavatories, as if Las Vegas had landed in Shropshire. It's exhilarating and strange to witness – and frightening too, for who knows what babies are being thrown out with all this bathwater?

"Now is the best time in China," said a friendly chap with good English who came up to us as we walked along the top of the city walls in Xian, an ancient imperial capital and "home of the Terracotta Warriors". The man, let's call him Mr Li, seemed anxious to talk.

"First we had Old China," he said, meaning the 4,000 or so years of dynastic rule that preceded Communism. "Then New China." He meant Maoism, which he likened to North Korea under Kim Jong-il. "And now we have Modern China."

As tourists bicycled past us, smiling and waving, Mr Li pointed beyond the red lanterns hung along the perimeter of the wall to the smoggy skyline – ranks of new apartment blocks and the concrete carcases of those still under construction.

Modern China – "Capitalism with Chinese characteristics" is how the Party likes to describe it – is responsible for all this hyperactivity, and Mr Li welcomes it. But all the concrete and glass in the world could not blot out his memories. For soon Mr Li was talking about the Cultural Revolution of the Sixties and Seventies in which, at the behest of Mao Tse-tung, the people and fabric of China were brutally knocked about.

"People's grandparents were beaten for having books," he said. "A lot of buildings were destroyed. Flowers were pulled up."

"And grass," I said, having read my Wild Swans (as indeed had Mr Li, though the book is banned in China).

"Grass. Yes." He shook his head at the insanity of it.

Guessing at his age, I suggested he must have fascinating memories of this time.

"I did it!" he exclaimed. "You've heard of Mao's Red Guard? I was a Red Guard." And in this moment of confession I wondered, not for the only time on this trip, whether China's frantic embracing of the new wasn't also a running away from the past.

The tension between old and new is palpable – a case in point being our onward journey from Xian. We had been booked on the 0830 train to Luoyang, another of China's ancient capitals, which lies 200 miles to the east in Henan Province.

According to the Lonely Planet guidebook, the train journey between the two cities takes about six hours, and we had stocked up accordingly. But having survived the bunfight to get aboard, we found ourselves in a carriage as roomy and plush as a business-class cabin on an international airline.

The guidebook was already out of date, though published just 12 months earlier: we were on a new bullet train service, which runs on an entirely new track, serviced by new stations, and speeds from Xian to Luoyang in one hour and 50 minutes. En route, the elevated trackway zipped above fields where poor farmers, waist-high in wheat, removed their conical straw hats and gazed at us in awe from the prison of the past.

Four days later we dropped in – literally – on some of these peasant farmers, who have been excluded from the party that is modern China. By this stage we had reached Shanxi Province, which embodies a uniquely Chinese paradox. It is simultaneously industrial – coal mines, cement works, power stations – and profoundly rural.

The landscape is defined by friable yellow earth called loess that is sliced into terraces, making the gentle hills look as if they have been tipped from jelly moulds, and planted with wheat and fruit trees. The farmers who work this thin soil by hand are not just close to the earth, they are in it – for many live in caves and underground houses cut from the loess.

With our guide, Luo Xiao Shan, who uses the name Peter Luo with foreign clients, we drove out from the modern city of Yuncheng on a toll expressway, and into a backwater of narrow lanes lined with wild hollyhocks. Chinese pheasants flitted through apricot orchards, a pig slept in dappled shade, a toothless crone smiled happily over a fence.

Peter asked the driver to stop and led us up a small hill with a flat top of bare earth. In the middle of the hill a sheer-sided hole dropped 30 feet to a sunken courtyard, as if someone had spatula-ed out a square from a dish of lasagne. This was the underground home of the local vet, 62-year-old Wang Shou Xian, and his wife.

Mr Wang beckoned us back down the hill to the entrance and put the kettle on for tea in one of the several rooms off the courtyard. Onion and coriander seeds were drying on the courtyard cobbles, and some herbal medicinal concoction was bubbling on a stove in one corner.

Mr Wang reckoned his family had lived here for more than 10 generations (each generation, Peter explained, being about 60 years). "The clay in the walls is like the flesh," said Mr Wang. "The stones are like the bones."

It seemed a delightful set-up. The rooms were spotless and cucumber-cool in the humid heat, and the Wangs have television, internet and piped water. But appearances can be deceptive, for the surrounding village is moribund, with more and more young men moving to the city in pursuit of the grail of modernity.

Peter said this way of life was dying out, and he did not regret it. He was ashamed of the rural poverty we saw, describing Shanxi Province ruefully as "backward-developed". On the other hand, the pace of change was bewildering to him. "I grew up in the Sixties and we used coupons," he said. "It was hard even to buy bean curd. China is changing so fast, so fast, and it is hard to follow the steps of it."

One striking difference from the time of my last visit, 12 years ago, is the development of domestic tourism. In 1998 the world-class Shanghai Museum was studiously quiet and virtually empty of people. In 2010 it reverberates with noise, laughter and the lizard clicks of a thousand digital cameras.

In the past decade the populace has gained both the leisure time and the money to travel, and on any given day millions are on the move, apparently not too fussy about where they go or what they see, so long as they are together and mobile. They travel by coach in large, irrepressibly noisy groups from one site to the next – 1,500-year-old statues as vast and dramatic as Abu Simbel, Buddhist temples, holy mountains and quaint museums – each group led by a guide with a megaphone and flag.

In the Qiao Family Courtyard near Pingyao, in Shanxi Province, a sprawling Qing Dynasty complex where Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern was filmed, four groups were crammed into one small room, each with its own guide trying to outdo the others by screeching into his megaphone.

The heat and noise were extraordinary, but it was a strangely uplifting experience – hilarious and touching, as if those gathered were still learning how to be tourists and weren't quite sure how it was done.

Off the beaten track as we were for most of the time, we were often objects of curiosity to these bustling hordes, but people were unfailingly polite and kind. In fact, the only rude utterance on the entire trip issued from the mouth of a scantily dressed Russian woman in the precincts of Shaolin Temple.

"Please move, sir!" she shouted, not wishing to have me infest the photograph she was taking of her husband doing the spiritual thing and lighting some incense sticks. "Very bad luck to light two," muttered our guide at the time, a happy-go-lucky young man called Ma Qong Bo. "It should be three."

Perched among the sacred Song Shan mountain range, Shaolin was one of the few places where we were able to see blue sky for any length of time. The inescapable truth is that much of China is miserably and shockingly polluted. Emissions from coal-fired power stations, coke plants, domestic stoves and exhaust pipes have reduced the sun to a tarnished coin in the sky.

In Beijing, they somehow pulled off the trick of removing the worst of the pollution from the city itself in time for the 2008 Olympics, but it remains as a kind of cordon around the perimeter. In the north of the city there is a bridge called Silver Ingot Bridge where in the Ming Dynasty – our Middle Ages – it was fashionable to stand and appreciate the view of the hills that rise some 15 miles west of the city.

The hills have not been seen for some time from Silver Ingot Bridge. But the crowds of young people, both locals and tourists, who throng this trendy neighbourhood are focused on other things. For this is the Lotus Market, a drag of bars and cafés that include a pole-dancing club called Sex and Da City.

At the end of the street we waited for a taxi in the shade of a tree and watched a group of old guys playing snatches of Chinese opera on traditional flute and erhu, a two-stringed instrument that looks like part of a car engine.

In front of this ensemble an elderly man in shorts, ankle socks and slipper-like shoes was practising his calligraphy. He did so with a calligraphy brush the size of a broom and he wrote not in ink but in water, dipping the brush in a bucket and sweeping it across the hot paving stones.

The letters he formed faded as fast as he wrote, and I suddenly felt relieved that we had come to China when we did, before much of what is memorable and unique fades too in the heat and rush of progress.

China essentials

The author's trip was organised by CTS Horizons (020 7836 9911; www.ctshorizons.com), which can tailor-make tours of any length and complexity. A nine-day tour of Beijing, Xitang, Shanghai, Suzhou and Xian costs from £1,395 per person, including b & b on a shared basis, international and internal flights, transfers, transport, sightseeing as listed and the services of English-speaking guides. A 14-day trip to Shanghai, Guilin and Yangshuo costs from £1,795 on the same basis.